These past few weeks I have been increasingly wondering why people complain about stock apps on iPhone. Granted, for some, the apps fall short in some areas; this is particularly true for those who use their iPhones in corporate environments where the tech department has its own apps or possibly where app usage restrictions exist or special use cases are only met by certain third-party apps.

But the practice of hating stock apps just for the sake of hating them has undeniably increased among the self-declared hip crowd. My own anger against bloatware (if you call appeals of bloatware removal “anger” that is) was well-founded because bloatware, by definition, is that which a user would not voluntarily have installed even if he had heard about it.

In this light, let us take a look at my own use of stock apps and examine cases where I use alternatives (and why I do so) as well as where I use the stock apps (and why I do not seek an alternative). The apps I will talk of that I use are Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Messages, Photos, Reminders and Podcasts; and I mention apps like Notes, iTunes and Calculator that I rarely (if ever) use. This is spread out over two articles for length.

A lot of people have been going on about a minimal iPhone lately. Most of that has something to do with stripping down the apps you use, having just one home screen and then sitting around and justifying it because you paid a small fortune for the phone and now you talk of using it as minimally as possible.

None of that makes sense. The iPhone has probably already replaced a lot of other things you use and thereby made your lifestyle a lot more minimal, if that is what you were going for. It likely replaced everything from desk calendars to USBs in cars to cinema and plane tickets and — for some people — laptops.

I am not one among them, so my iPhone setup is not what I would call minimal. I do however follow a certain practice where I try to reduce the apps I use in some ways I have not seen a lot of others adopt. That is one reason I wrote this article — the other was because people wanted to know what was on my iPhone.

I have been spending some time on Ello recently and I have generally liked it. Being invite-only and beta at the moment, Ello still needs some sculpting, but so far the developers and designers, Paul Budnitz, Berger & Föhr, and Mode Set, who are, as they describe themselves, seven well-known artists and programmers, have done a great job.

Right from the start, Ello has a somewhat informal yet encouraging feel to it — despite the predominantly, nigh fully, black and white design. In brief, Ello is gunning to be what social networks should have been all this while: an ad-free, content-rich social platform which does not thrive on selling user data.

I joined Ello right at the start of 2015 and have no plans of leaving. Ello is something I had been looking for all this while, both in terms of design ideas/usage and community. But that does not mean Ello is perfect; there are quite a few things that could do with improvement.

It started as an offhand idea, so we began with literally zero preparation. Half a basketball court, a ball and an iPhone in hand, I do not recall just when the idea struck me, but the four of us who were together had soon decided to make a short film.

The story, as I often like it in all of my films, was simple and open to interpretation. Two guys, a basketball: it does not matter whether they had the court or — quite literally — what was blocking their way, they would still play their game.

It is entertaining — perhaps even pleasing — to watch such tech giants as Apple, Google and Microsoft battle it out year after year. And it is fun to take sides (we always do that). But it is becoming increasingly clear that no matter who wins in the end, and at whatever rate, us consumers will be little more than sore losers.

I must admit, this was neither clear nor obvious to me a couple of years back — and why should it be? I was immersed in the Android ecosystem; and I can say this much for certain: anybody who has not seen outside Android cannot possibly understand the gravity of this situation.

Dynamic range has always been the Achilles’ heel of smartphone photography. It is the one aspect where dSLRs shine and simply cannot be outdone by our phones. (There also used to be auto-focusing on this list, but with phase detection AF on iPhone 6 Plus, Apple has raised the bar really high.)

Among several additions to iOS 8 comes burst mode capability — click and hold for several shots in quick succession. My iPhone 6 Plus shoots 10 frames per second which is almost twice the speed of my Nikon D600, which shoots 5.5 frames per second. Of course, the fact that the sensor is bigger, more memory needs to be written and other such factors come into play here.

The biggest advantage of this burst mode feature means making HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos with iPhones is no longer a software-only affair spewing out fake HDR/grunge images, but actual multiple bracketed exposures combined into one HDR photo.

To many people, their home screens seem like a trivial aspect of smartphone usage. But having a cluttered home screen goes against the concept of a smart phone itself: if you cannot find what you need when you need it without searching for it for hither and thither, it becomes clear that your phone is smarter than you. Which is a pretty dangerous thing when you think of it.

Whatever platform you are on, having your phone set up for the most efficient use is a no-brainer. Having moved from the freedom of Android to the decidedly more sophisticated approach of iOS, I will focus on setting up your iPhone 6 Plus home screen. But the basic ideas should carry on for most devices.